There was good and bad news for the environment this week. The good was that brewer Adnams has released the world’s first carbon neutral bitter on draught. The bad was the unveiling of a new timber frame-knocking promotional thrust from the ‘Modern’ Masonry Alliance (MMA).
The MMA makes no bones about wanting to reverse timber frame’s recent gains in UK housing market share and “secure masonry as the preferred build method”. Previously it has gone down the ‘timber building is a fire risk’ route, failing, naturally, to mention that a fire breaks out in brick homes at the rate of about four an hour (given that there are about 54,000 house fires in the UK a year and brick accounts for at least 80% of all housing).
Part of the focus of the MMA’s latest effort is the credit crunch squeeze on construction. The message is that now is not the time to experiment with ‘modern methods of construction’, like timber frame, but to stick with brick because it’s cheap and the UK’s ‘traditional’ building material. It seems that we can put on hold the issues of climate change and government targets for new housing to meet its Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH) and be ‘zero carbon’ by 2016, which these new building methods are designed to tackle.
“Until now all talk has been about the CSH and timber frame has formed a major part of this,” MMA director Mike Leonard is quoted as saying. “But builders are not now so concerned about what is going to happen in 2016 and more about what’s happening next week.” It would be instructive to get the housing minister’s view on this particular tack.
Mr Leonard also claims that wood prices are up 30% on the year, making brick building “15% cheaper”. But you can twist figures every which way. Our sources say the annual price rise in the key timber frame material, C16 CLS spruce, is 15%, which would seem to wipe out brick’s advantage.
Of course, many companies in the wood supply chain are not directly involved in timber frame. But the MMA’s brand of negativity can infect perceptions of the material generally. However, I shall be at next week’s Great British Beer festival supping Adnams’ new East Green bitter and toasting the good sense of builders and construction specifiers to see the organisastion’s various campaigns for the propaganda they are.
